Happy New Year everyone! The Wing Commander Saga staff would like to thank the thousands and thousands of dedicated Wing Commander fans who downloaded the first installment of Wing Commander Saga over the year.

Just remember: If you're going out tonight, stay safe. We want you back playing Wing Commander Saga multiplayer with us next year. If you're not going out tonight, feel free to drop by our forums.

To that, we're repeating something we've done in the past - releasing something as a "Christmas present" to our fans. This time we would like to share with you a picture of Klav's rendition of the marine dropship, which will be featured in the WC Saga full campaign.

The Spartan dropship is a heavy landing craft that can carry a hundred Marines and a pair of hover battle tanks. Much larger then the Hermes shuttle, it normally deployed for full-scale planetary assaults. Like all Marine craft, it can forcibly override and board all known Kilrathi naval vessels and can function in all sorts of planetary atmopshere. In addition to lasers and gatling mass drivers for infantry support, it carries anti-matter missiles for suppression bombardments and micro-missile pods for anti-tank support.

This has been a very productive year for the Wing Commander community! Many great fan projects have been produced some high quality releases this year. Our prologue release and subsequent WC3 demo, WC4 demo, and custom fan-made missions are just one of the many. We are excited that the WC community has so much creative energy. The CIC is holding its annual awards ceremony for fan projects and websites. Drop by the CIC and see what has been released this year. There are a lot of great projects to choose from, so make sure to cast your vote for the one you think deserves the award for project of the year and website of the year.

For this week's update, we would like to feature some of the work of one of our newer team members, Talon. Talon has reproduced the Rapier as it appeared in Super Wing Commander. It is a very capable dogfighter with some respectable weaponry.

f just looking at it isn't enough, you can take this new Rapier on a test flight in one of our new custom missions, where you'll find that even a standard convoy raid can come with a few surprises! You can download the mission file here. You can provide feedback here.

This week, we would like to announce that we will soon be releasing a significant upgrade to the Wing Commander Saga Prologue. This upgrade will include a new multiplayer mode with deathmatch dogfights (up to 12 players), team vs. team matches (up to 6 players per team), and cooperative missions as well. The upcoming prologue patch will also include some tweaks to the game engine, several new special effects, and rebalanced ships and weapons. So, starting practicing up and get ready to meet your friends (and foes) for some high-adrenaline online battles!

For this week's update, the WC Saga team would like to highlight our WC4 mission branching demo. Mission branching will be a part of the WC Saga main campaign. In order to test this function, Tolwyn has put together a few test missions that loosely remake the first few missions of Wing Commander 4! You can follow either the Confed or the Border Worlds paths, and several new models are included in the release, like the Banshee, Avenger, Vindicator, Bearcat, Dragon, and the Intrepid herself. Check it out here.

For this week's update, we would like to share a musical track from Saga's second composer, Tim Janssen. This song features a dramatic and high-energy score that emulates the pulse-pounding feeling of an intense dogfight. Click on the link for a sample.

I've been hard at work off the radar creating all new, never before seen content for WC: Saga. Some familiar stuff, some new stuff, but all with Saga's devotion to high quality. I tried to put my own spin on the old Concordia, bringing the old ship a little more into the real world.